The Ballad of Ben and Annie
by stefanie bean
Summary: She was the light of his dark childhood, until she disappeared. Then she returned, promising love in the midst of war.
1. The Hollow Men

**Chapter 1: Rats' Feet in Dry Cellars**

_We are the hollow men  
>We are the stuffed men<br>Leaning together  
>Headpiece filled with straw.<br>- _T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Ben Linus met Annie Lamont at the age of eight, when he was a friendless, motherless child brought to the Island by his father in early 1973. The recession had hit Portland before a lot of places, and no one wanted Roger to paint their houses or barns anymore. Roger skated along from one odd job to the next, but as he told Ben more than once, like the song said, all he got was "just another day older and deeper in debt."

Then there was the probation. It was just a little speed he'd sold, twenty bucks worth. What was all the fuss about? It's not like he was some kind of big-time dealer or something. However, Roger wasn't supposed to leave the state for two years, and that sure cut down on the jobs he could take. If somebody needed him over in Vancouver or Mt. Vista, he was shit-out-of-luck. So the less Roger worked, the more he drank, until that day when he got a phone call from somebody named Horace.

"Old Whore-ass," Roger said to the uncomprehending Ben, Roger laughing as if the boy had joined in, rather than staring blankly. A few more phone calls, though, and Roger made the announcement. They were moving. Leaving this shit-stained town for good, in fact. Old Whore-ass had offered him a job. Best of all, he got Roger's probation lifted, so that he could go in the first place. It was kind of complicated; even Roger himself didn't know how Horace Goodspeed was going to pull it off.

"Lawyers, I guess," Roger snickered. "These rich bastards, they all have lawyers."

When Ben got off the submarine, sick and dazed, he caught a glimpse of her across the dock, and from that moment he was hers. They didn't speak until he saw her again in the Dharma Recruitment Station, but it was enough. Their friendship sparked up suddenly and caught fire.

As the new kid in school, Ben was too shy to talk to anyone, even Annie. Sure, she'd given him a candy bar at the Dharma Initiative Orientation Station, but this was different. This was school, and he didn't blame her one bit for not returning his glance every time he tried to catch her eye. Then their teacher Miss Olivia announced that because Ben was new, they'd do something special, something they hadn't done in a while. They'd been interrupted by that Hostiles attack, Miss Olivia said. So unfortunate, but now they would have some fun.

When the children finally got settled in their desks again, the volcano demonstration continued. They were to get into pairs and make one of their own. Miss Olivia put Ben and Annie together, and at first Ben thought his heart would burst with anticipation, because he had fallen in love from that first moment on the dock. But when Annie's box volcano exploded in the wrong direction and covered her with flour, turning her into a gnomish old lady with thick white pigtails, her mouth forming a pink round "O" in her astonished face, that was when Ben knew that he loved her.

Roger hated living on the Island. When Ben came home from school, Roger lay half-asleep on the couch instead of working. "No television," Roger griped. "If they would have told me there was no TV, I'd have never come. A man can't even watch the goddamn fights."

Sometimes, though, Roger did stay asleep, and Ben tiptoed past, hoping not to waken him. If Roger did stir, though, Ben would have to listen to a whining, slurred monologue, which more often than not ended with a smack, or a beer can tossed across the room at Ben's head.

Annie's father never drank or hit her. Her parents worked in a laboratory somewhere else on the Island, and no one was supposed to know where they went, not even Annie. Annie was ordered to stay in the house while her parents were gone. She didn't listen to them, of course, so after her mother and father left, she roamed the Barracks and the outlying hills all the way to the sonic fence. It was either that, or sit in the lonely, bare cottage.

Whenever Roger caught Ben with her, he dragged him roughly away, or even cuffed him. "Why would she care to play with the likes of you? She's the daughter of a scientist, and you're a janitor's kid."

Ben told Annie everything: about Roger's bouts of drunkenness, the blows, even that he'd seen his mother in his window on the night that the Hostiles tried to shoot up their school. She didn't even laugh at him, or say that he was crazy.

Those golden days were bright enough to light up a lifetime.

His birthday arrived, and with it her present. Miss Olivia had helped her get started with the carving, although she had done most of the work herself. It had taken two months, but the painting only took one afternoon.

He took it home, floating on air, until Roger shot him down like a clay pigeon. Tear-stricken, Ben ran blindly, as far as he could go, until he reached the sonic fence. There the strange woman stood on the other side, blonde and pale in the moonlight, dressed in a short blue frock.

Ben knew what would happen to him if he crossed the invisible sonic barrier. Terrified, twisted with emotion, he stumbled back to the Barracks. Instead of going straight home, he sneaked around back of Annie's house, and tossed one piece of gravel, then another at her window. Finally she stuck her head out.

"Your father's going to tan your hide," she said.

"I hate him. Hope he dies. I just came to tell you that I'm running away. And I want you to come with me."

She looked around as if she hoped no one heard. "I'm scared, Ben. The jungle scares me."

"I'll go first. I'll make a place for us, where we can hide. We can go fishing and eat fruit. They'll never catch us."

"But there's Hostiles."

"We'll join them."

Her jaw dropped. Hoping it was true, Ben said, "They don't have to go to school or sit by themselves in a house all day. They run around the jungle and shoot things. They have fun." He really had Annie's attention now. "Tomorrow I'm going to go find them."

When Ben came back, he took his punishment for skipping school and running away with a hard face, and only a few tears. Astonishingly, Roger didn't even beat him. Ben told himself it was because Roger didn't care enough to. He gave away his rabbit Bun-Bun to one of the boys in his class, because he couldn't look at the little thing any longer without getting sick with guilt. After all, he'd first sent his rabbit through the fence, before himself. The code shut-off had worked, but what if it hadn't? Bun-Bun would have been dead, blood running from her ears. And it would have been Ben's fault.

Nor did he tell Annie about the strange man he met in the woods, the one with the funny clothes and long hair who told him that he had to be "very, very patient." Ben had come back to Annie empty-handed, and she knew it.

She didn't mention anything more about running away, and neither did he.

Later, after Thanksgiving, everything collapsed. Annie met Ben at the gazebo, and in a voice thick with tears told him that her parents were moving to California. The two scientists had been part of the Island's original scouting team, before the Dharma Initiative had even arrived. They'd brought her to the Island when she was two, and it was the only life she'd ever known. She didn't want to leave the Island. Why did her parents have to go work on some dumb Dharma station in Los Angeles? Didn't they have enough to do here? It wasn't fair. Now she had to move to some strange place, where she didn't know anyone.

As she sobbed, Ben's world imploded around him. He uttered one inanity after another. It wouldn't be too bad. She could go to Hollywood. She could watch movies in a real theater, not just on a wrinkled white screen set up in the Barracks cafeteria. There would be television, not just the grainy, jerky 16mm films of old shows they sometimes got to see in the Barracks rec room.

Annie just stared at him, and his heart sank while her silence sizzled like the fuse of a bomb. Then she spun around and fled with such energy that the tears flew off her face, and a few hit Ben's cheek.

A few weeks later she was gone, leaving Ben to the loneliest birthday of his young life.

Two summers later, Ben had some kind of accident, then became so ill that all he could remember was waking up in a tent with that strange man from the jungle and a bunch of his friends. Only Richard, as he called himself, didn't look all funky anymore. Instead, he dressed and wore his hair like everyone else now. The men and women he lived with called themselves the "Good People." Ben stayed with them a week, and then they took him back to the fence and dropped him off.

For months afterward, much of his memory was a tangled jumble, but he never forgot Annie.

During his sickness there had been a terrible accident at one of the drilling sites, and most of the moms and their kids had left. Ben would have as well, but on that day he lay in bed in the Temple, tended to by the Good People.

Months passed, and only a few of the children came back to the Island. There were only enough kids to make up one classroom now, from the littlest to the oldest. Because it was too boring and slow to sit and listen to Miss Olivia try to teach the first graders how to read, the few older kids faded away from the classroom one by one. Finally Miss Olivia gave up schooling them entirely, and focused instead on the youngest ones. At least they still looked at her with love and adoration, rather than with the boredom or simmering hatred which poured off the older children.

* * *

><p>When Ben turned sixteen he put on a workman's uniform, and joined his father mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. But there was always a book in Ben's back pocket. By then, too, he was working closely with Richard Alpert.<p>

Ben had keys now to every Dharma Initiative office in the Barracks. Sometimes he stole papers. Sometimes he just copied them, or took notes. Increasingly he put his prodigious memory to work, so that all he needed to do was quickly scan memos or papers, then follow up later with a flawless redaction to Richard or Charles Widmore.

The Barracks weren't crowded anymore, but Ben continued to live with Roger Linus. He didn't have to; no one would have cared if he took a bunk in the dormitories or even squatted in a house of his own. Richard didn't want him to, though, and for Ben, Richard's word was law.

Ben didn't miss Annie that much anymore, even though there were no girls his age at the Barracks. Most of the women were older, and the few girls were just kids. Even Horace and Amy had no more children after Ethan. Ben always had a kind word or sometimes even a treat for the little squirt, because he felt sorry for Ethan, growing up alone like that. He could relate.

There were whispers and rumors, though. The few women who did get pregnant were hastily evacuated from the Barracks, and none of them came back. Where they went, Ben neither knew nor cared.

Richard was getting more agitated, too. He never criticized the intelligence which Ben brought him. But he wanted medical records in particular, and that meant going to the infirmary, which Ben hated. He couldn't say why. Whenever he walked by the low-slung yellow building with the big front porch and wide windows, cold, dead fingers of fear clutched at his throat. His palms sweated, and his heart pounded. But he did what Richard asked.

Richard was particularly interested in the new station the Dharma people were building in a remote jungle location far south of the Barracks. What were they up to? Why were they moving medical supplies there? Surely there were documents about that, too, and Ben could find them.

There were lessons for Ben, too, nothing like he'd ever experienced in Miss Olivia's school. How to move through the trees and make no sound. How to find his way around the Island using only the sun or the stars. How to live on the forest's bounty, and if none could be found, how to endure starvation and thirst. On other days, though, Richard didn't lay harsh woodcraft lessons on Ben, or press him for information at all. Sometimes the two of them just sat under the tall trees and talked.

Ben treasured those moments above all.

Sitting in filtered sunlight under the great ironwood trees, Richard's voice played over Ben like a slow, soothing violin. There was a war, Richard told him, one which had been going on for a very long time before Ben had come to the Island, before Ben was born, even. In early 1953, sailors with gigantic ships full of concrete, supplies and guns had come to the Island. They brought soldiers with them too, and the men built a radio tower, in order to communicate with their massive supply ships.

Then smaller ships arrived, dozens of them, loaded down with thousands of tons of supplies. The sea-men and soldiers stripped naked to the waist, and as they sweated in the tropical heat, they mixed hundreds of thousands of gallons of concrete for the bunkers which they built all over the Island. They chopped down hundreds of ancient trees and sawed them into planks, then constructed houses and barracks in the gentle verdant caldera in the northern center of the Island.

All around the Island, the men lived in canvas tents which dotted the green fields like fever blisters. They never knew that the Good People watched them constantly. Oblivious, the military men cut trees for firewood, hunted the boar, and littered the beaches with their cigarette butts. They speared crabs with their bayonets, or shot seagulls for target practice. They cursed the sun, the sea, the lack of native women, and how much they missed the Honolulu brothels, even if you did have to wait two hours in line for ten minutes of fun.

Some of the Good People wanted to strike right away, to drive them off the Island or kill them, but Richard talked them out of it. It was Jacob's will, to let them do what they came for, whatever that was.

So the soldiers and sailors continued to build. Nine months later, a whole mock small town had been erected in the caldera, complete with community center and even an officer's club. The military leaders had arguments which Richard couldn't understand. All he could tell was that something had gone wrong, that was for certain. Eventually the officers and their aides moved into the village which they'd built, leaving the rest of their men to roam the Island and camp wherever they wanted.

A year after the sailors arrived, a young Royal Australian marine named Charles Widmore strode into the Good People's camp. Bold as brass, he demanded to speak to Richard, alone. Widmore and Richard held parley, and when Richard emerged from the lean-to where they'd met, his face was white and he shook as if with fever.

Richard had heard of artillery, even seen it in action. But Widmore's story was incredible. The new men were building something they had named Jacob's Ladder, part of a project called Operation Castle.

The gigantic iron cylinder coated with lead was a kind of cannonball. The new men called it Jughead, and suspended it on a gantry in the middle of the Island, where it was designed to blow up directly on the Island itself. The military scientists would observe from their ship, fifty miles offshore. Afterward, the scientists would survey what was left, especially of the Barracks, as the whole point was to get the idea of what sort of damage a ten-megaton ground burst would do to a small American town.

"Why are you telling us this?" Richard wanted to know.

"Because I like it here," Widmore answered. "I didn't go AWOL just to get buried under a pile of radioactive glass."

Richard tied Widmore to a tree, and threatened him with torture for his outrageous lies. Then Richard went to go speak with Jacob. Still, Richard wondered if Widmore might actually be telling the truth. No one could concoct such an extravagant story with a straight face. Who could believe that big cylinder of lead was in actuality a single cannonball of a type which could destroy entire islands, cities even, whose fireball would swell so large that it would consume everything, leaving only glass or ash? Unbelievable, yet Jacob must be told.

Sitting at the sea-side, in front of a simmering pot full of twigs and sticks, Jacob was dyeing some linen fabric. As he spooned the golden-brown cloth around in the pot, he seemed unconcerned, indifferent, even.

Yes, he knew of these bombs which had brought two cities to rubble. Yes, he knew what an explosion like that might do to the Island. Then Jacob kept on stirring.

"Aren't you worried about this Widmore?" Richard wanted to know.

Jacob just gave Richard a long look, too world-weary even to be annoyed. "Why should I be? I'm the one who brought him here."

When Richard returned two days later, Widmore was strolling about the camp-site free as you please. Most of the Good People in camp had already pledged their fealty to him, including the tender and beautiful Ellie Hawking, who at seventeen had just passed through the ritual of womanhood and was now at liberty to choose a man. Both the Good People and their new chieftain were of one mind. The sailors, soldiers, and officers of Joint Task Force One were to die. All of them.

Richard just shook his head, incredulous.

Something confused Ben, though, as he listened to Richard's story. "I thought you were the one in charge of the Good People."

Richard said that it didn't work like that. He, Richard, was simply an advisor. An intercessor, if you will. And if the Good People had chosen a mere buck-private deserter and a fresh-faced girl of seventeen summers to lead them, that was no skin off Richard's nose, as foolish as Richard might have found it. Jacob would do as he willed.

By this time, most of the Joint Task Force had abandoned Jughead and the Island itself, leaving only a skeleton crew. After the Good People had dispatched the remaining men, they helped themselves to the guns, tents, barrels of supplies. A few of the Good People even sailed over to the single remaining Joint Task Force ship, a single research vessel which remained after all the big transports had sailed away. After the Good People killed the crew and looted it, they scuttled it.

Long years of peace followed, where the only people who came to the Island washed up there from shipwrecks. Those who didn't fall off cliffs or get torn to pieces in the jungle joined the Good People. It was a time of contentment, and Richard smiled as he told Ben about it.

Richard also told Ben the story of Jacob. He was a great man, more than a man, almost. He held all of them in the palm of his hand, cared for them, protected them. Jacob's love was like God's, and like God, Jacob had chosen them to be his special people. They weren't only the Good People; they were Jacob's People as well.

So while the soldiers and sailors with their bomb had started the war, their departure didn't finish it, not by a long shot. For after that interlude of peace, the Dharma Initiative showed up.

Richard didn't understand why Jacob had let the Dharma research group move into the old military bunkers and barracks, or let them set up all their stations, camps and experiments on the Island. Nor could Richard see why Jacob let the Dharma Initiative security forces hunt down the Good People on a lark, or allow them to be grabbed by Dharma researchers and taken to Hydra Island as the subjects of experiments. There had to be some good reason.

Jacob's ways weren't their ways, Richard explained. He was never to be challenged or questioned, only obeyed.

"I'm ready to obey," Ben assured Richard. "Anything. Anything Jacob wants me to do, I'll do."

"I appreciate that, Benjamin," Richard said. "But you need to be patient. There are still many things which you haven't yet learned."

As in any war, Richard explained, the good guys had a right to defend themselves, and when they did, there would always be casualties and collateral damage. That's why Richard needed Ben to keep doing his job. He was the best spy they'd ever had in this great war which had gone on so long. True, there had been truces and negotiations, but the Dharma people broke their promises time and again. They couldn't be trusted, and that's why Richard needed Ben.

Richard leaned in to Ben, his piercing eyes dark and serious. There were things under the earth, Richard told Ben, forces under the Island that you didn't want to disturb. That's why the Good People stipulated in their negotiations with Dharma that there was to be no drilling, ever.

Further, there were places on the Island where Dharma was to never go, places special to Jacob. But the Dharma Initiative went there anyway, dug their mines and planted their generators. That's why what Ben did was so crucial, so important to the war. And one day, Richard told Ben, Jacob would personally thank him for it.

Richard could promise all this because Richard was Jacob's right-hand man, and could assure Ben that he could someday join them, that he was wanted, that he was one of them. So for years Ben worked with Richard from the inside of the Barracks, from behind the sonic fence. His job was to report on anything and everything he could discover about Dharma Initiative research projects. Thus Ben's days lurched between long bouts of unrelieved janitorial tedium and heart-stopping instances when it seemed he would be caught. But he never was.

Then, at the start of a new year with no more promise or hope than any of the old ones, Annie returned.

* * *

><p>She stood on the dock, unsteady from the submarine voyage, long blonde hair blowing about her face in the breeze. She held onto a small suitcase like it was the only stable vantage point in a wildly rollicking world. The lean, scruffy man next to her was her father, even though he was entirely gray now. But even though Annie had grown, Ben would have known her anywhere. Her eyes, though, were hard and sad, as if she had suffered on long, difficult roads.<p>

He had recently turned twenty-one.

At first Ben didn't see much of her. Dr. Lamont was a physicist, and he spent most of his time away from the Barracks and took his daughter with him. Sometimes when Dr. Lamont came back for meetings or conferences with Horace Goodspeed, Ben and Annie would sit in the gazebo like they used to, not touching, just enjoying one another's company.

Most of the time she shrank back and pulled in on herself, but once in a while the old sweet smile would peek forth. Small bits of her history came out, like how Annie's mom had left them and gone back to Ann Arbor. They were getting a divorce, but that was fine with her. Her mom had never been home much anyway. Then her dad finished up his Dharma work in Los Angeles, to come back to the Island. Annie didn't want to go, but she had no job and no money of her own. She'd just flunked out of college after two years of complete disinterest.

Her laugh was hollow and without humor. "My dad doesn't know what to do with me."

One day, Annie and her father had a fight, right out there on the commons lawn. Nearby, Ben and Roger were raking leaves and debris from the grounds around the gazebo. Ben pretended not to notice, but he heard everything. Annie announced that she was staying in their house at the Barracks from now on, instead of going with her father up to that horrible station in the mountains.

"It's boring as hell," she shouted. "Type one column of numbers after another onto punch cards, then feed them into the card readers. And all you do is fiddle with equipment all day long. I'm sick of sleeping on a cot instead of a proper bed, with computers and machines keeping me up all night. No wonder they called it 'the Tempest.' It's certainly loud as one!"

Her father tried to hush her. "Quiet! Don't say that name, that's a classified project!"

She kept shouting at him. He was crazy, too, if he thought she was going for another try at college back on the mainland. Is that the only reason he'd brought her here, to nag her about going back to college? She wasn't going anywhere. She liked it here. And at twenty, she could do as she pleased.

The argument swerved onto a whole new tack.

"What do you think you're going to do with your life?" her father said, not caring that everyone could hear. "Here I am with two PhDs, one in physics, one in chemistry, and you couldn't even pass college algebra."

It was only because of his influence at UCLA that he'd managed to secure her admission in the first place. Ungrateful, that's what she was. Nothing but ingratitude since she was a child. "Frittering away your time on nothing," he added. What was he going to do with her? She might as well stay in the Barracks, because she was useless to his research, with no inclination for the simplest scientific tasks.

"You should just put on a workman's uniform, like those two over there." Annie's dad waved his arm over to where Ben continued to rake. Ben winced and looked away as he always did. But Ben didn't forget. He never forgot.

(_continued_)


	2. Deliberate Disguises

**Chapter 2: Deliberate Disguises**

_Let me also wear  
><em>_Such deliberate disguises  
><em>_Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves...  
><em>_Behaving as the wind behaves  
><em>_- _T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Annie went to work as a server and cleaner in the cafeteria where the Dharma scientists took their meals. Her father must have gotten his work assignment changed, because he spent more time working with the Goodspeeds, and didn't go up to the Tempest Station that much anymore. On most evenings and weekends Annie baby-sat Ethan, who at eight was a handful, his boundless whirlwind of lonely energy unspent because there were no other children his age to play with.

Of all the Dharma Initiative children, Ethan Goodspeed was the last.

That marked the dawn of Ben's and Annie's days. To escape the prying eyes of her father and the Goodspeeds, the two of them stole the security code, slipped past the sonic fence and headed off into the jungle. Ben had already explored the paths and passages which led from the Barracks to the various regions haunted by the Good People, navigating them as easily as he crept around his own house in the dark, trying not to wake Roger. Annie, though, had never gone wandering through the towering green jungle. Every exclamation she made, every indrawn breath, every expression of wonder which crossed her face made Ben's heart soar.

Then one day, by the side of the big unnamed river which split the Island's land mass in two, Ben and Annie ran into Richard Alpert.

At first Ben thought Richard would be angry at them for exploring the woods. Richard spoke kindly to Annie, though, and within fifteen minutes she was wiping away tears. She hated her father and mother. Her father had driven her mother way, while her mother had left without even looking back. Ben knew Richard well enough to know how interested Richard was in what Annie had to say, especially the parts about the Tempest and what the Dharma Initiative had going on up there.

Then Richard put his arm around Annie, and drew the sniffling girl close to his chest. Ben stared for a few seconds, then for the first time felt a flash of adult jealousy so hot that he wanted to slit Richard's throat right then and there. Richard, though, caught the look in Ben's eyes and let the girl go at once. Ben seized Annie's hand immediately, and now she rested in Ben's arms, wiped her face on Ben's shirt sleeve, nestled in Ben's arms as Richard told them about the renewal of the war.

For war was coming, they could bet on that.

Then, as if it had been her idea all along, Annie wanted to help too. Richard told her that someday she and Ben could leave the Dharma village together, and come to live with Jacob's People in the depths of the great jungle. For now, though, Annie's job was to continue to work in the cafeteria, and keep her ears open for anything which might be of use, especially about the Tempest. If her father had any papers locked away in drawers or cabinets at home, those could come in handy, too. Finally, she was to assist Ben in coordinating lists of all the people who went in and out of the Barracks, as well as on and off the _Galaga_, the Dharma Initiative submarine.

So Ben pushed his mop, Annie dished up macaroni salad and canned-beef Stroganoff in the Barracks cafeteria, and they both spied on the Dharma Initiative.

Ben's father Roger, though: Roger never changed. He would have long since gone back to Portland but he couldn't, largely because of the debts he had racked up while working for Dharma. Food, clothing, and a modest house were all provided by the Dharma Initiative, as well as a salary. The sign-on bonus, too, was generous. Nor did Roger pay any taxes; he had never figured out how that worked. It had sounded pretty good at the time: all expenses paid, wages tax free.

You wouldn't think Roger would have found a way to spend his sign-on bonus, but he had. Roger had racked up many debts, which in a rare mood of honor he settled before he and Ben left Oregon. Then, when Roger first arrived on the Island, disoriented and lonely, he fell in easily with the poker games run by some new best buddies from the motor pool. Too late Roger discovered that under the cloak of beer and camaraderie, the smiling men weren't really rookie players at all. Instead, they'd snookered him good.

In calm voices, Roger's new friends told him that non-payment meant a midnight ride outside the fence, and people usually didn't come back from those. Not in one piece, anyway.

Then there were the little luxuries, and not those Apollo bars which they passed out for free. Roger couldn't stand the sticky, yucky things, although all the kids and most of the adults gobbled them down. Roger only drank sour Dharma beer or tannic wine when there was nothing else. The whiskey, the cigarettes, the potato chips and beef jerky strips which Roger craved, all those things cost money.

Not just any normal amount of money either, like what you would pay at a convenience store right outside of Portland. All these luxuries had to be shipped to the Island at high cost, and all the charges went onto Roger's account. With interest. The more Roger hated, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the more his debt slavery deepened. All Roger's hatred focused on Horace Goodspeed, whom he blamed for getting him into this mess in the first place.

Ben didn't hate Horace, though, and not just because it was in Horace's office that the choicest morsels for Richard's consumption could be found. Annie spent many an evening watching Ethan over at Horace and Amy's, because Horace was in charge of the whole Initiative on the Island, and had to go to many meetings. This gave Annie ample opportunity to go through Amy and Horace's drawers, as well as the delectable contents of their refrigerator, stocked as it was with delicacies like butter and chocolate.

Best of all, the Goodspeeds didn't mind if Ben came over while Annie was there. Ethan loved them both, too. He begged for Annie even when Horace and Amy didn't have meetings, and his parents indulged him. They were fond of the quiet, self-possessed girl, even if Ben with his staring eyes and stiff mannerisms made them not feel quite as sorry for him as they should have.

Sometimes very late at night, after Ethan had gone to sleep, Ben and Annie sat on the front porch, kissing and whispering softly in between kisses so that no one would hear. Once Annie asked, "When they come, they won't hurt Horace and Amy, will they?"

"Of course not," Ben answered, because if he said that he really didn't know, Annie might pull her small hand out of his. When he had tried to ask Richard, all Richard had said was that in times of war, a man had to decide what side he was on. As kind as some of the Dharma people were, it had been decided that they weren't good people, even the kind ones.

Once Ben and Annie fully joined them, the genuine Good People, they would understand. But until then, Ben would just have to trust Richard, because by trusting Richard, Ben and Annie were actually trusting Jacob. That's how you knew if you were one of the Good People: you trusted Jacob. Jacob knew what was right. He knew who was good, and who wasn't. One day, Richard wouldn't say when, the Dharma Initiative would have to go.

* * *

><p>Annie and Ben started sleeping together in the forest whenever they could get away, but stopped when they discovered how many eyes there were in the jungle, always spying, always watching the Dharma folk as they went to and fro. Her own house was out of the question, as Annie's father didn't go to work anymore. Instead, he spent most of the day inside in his darkened bedroom, lying on the bed or sitting in a chair, head in his hands. The Goodspeed's house was fine if all you wanted to do was neck on the porch, or raid the well-stocked refrigerator, or the bookshelves' seemingly endless supply of books, but Ethan was watchful while awake and sometimes walked in his sleep.<p>

So they trysted in one or another of the abandoned houses which grew more dust-covered and mustier as time went by. Annie had brought a year's worth of pills with her from Los Angeles, and Ben tried not to think why she'd had them in the first place. Eventually, though, she ran out, so she scrounged what few prophylactics she could find in the abandoned houses. One night she broke into the infirmary and rummaged through the sparsely-stocked pharmacy shelves, but didn't find anything.

She asked around at the cafeteria, or in the community center where the remaining few women gathered to knit or dabble in water-colors in their off-hours. Those young enough to worry about pregnancy all had operations, the women told her. One of the new requirements if you wanted to stay on the Island.

Annie was too embarrassed to ask what kind of operation.

"We're kind of out of the market," one woman laughed.

Another woman fixed Annie with a stern look and said, "You'd better be careful, missy," but clammed up after that.

Ben told Annie about the new medical station, half a day's walk to the south. He had seen the inventory lists in Horace's office, and had dutifully passed them on to Richard. No pills were on the lists, but maybe there were some already down there which had been inventoried earlier.

Early the next morning, Annie and Ben trekked down to the new station called the Staff, its symbol the winged rod of Hermes entwined with two serpents. "MDG: Medical Group research, Fert." was all that Ben could find about it in Horace's papers. From the account ledgers, Ben could tell that it was expensive, even more costly than the Tempest which Annie's father had tried to keep so concealed. Or maybe Horace was just dipping into the funds. What was Horace spending all that money on at a medical station?

Ben and Annie hid in the underbrush close to the Staff. Richard would have been proud of them, for both were silent and invisible, as the Good People had taught them. Before long, a few black-clad Dharma security men tromped down the path, followed by a Dharma researcher who had kept pushing science books on Ben when he was younger. But that wasn't all. Between them, the security men frog-marched a bound, struggling girl with a bag over her head. Even though Ben and Annie couldn't see her face, her ragged earth-colored clothes showed her to be one of Jacob's People.

The Dharma men thought they were clever in how they had concealed the Staff's entrance, but any one of the Good People could have found it blindfolded on a night with no moon. The girl must have sensed the open door, because she gave a mighty kick to the right, then the left, and one of the security men let her go for a second. She would have gotten away had not the other man clubbed her on the head, hard. After she went down like a sack of flour, the security man apologized to the scientist.

"That doesn't matter," the researcher answered. "Her head's not the part of her that we need."

Ben and Annie gaped at one another from behind their leafy screen, eyes wide with horror.

It was long after the Dharma people had gone inside the Staff station that Ben and Annie slipped back into the forest, pills forgotten. They knew where the Good People's camp was hidden, or at least one of them, but never before had they dared to approach it. Now they did, facing the stares and stone-silent faces of twenty of Jacob's People. Richard came from out of the midst of them, accompanied by Charles Widmore.

As Ben told Widmore what he and Annie had seen, Widmore's face grew red down to the roots of his thinning hair. From the dark shadows where the firelight didn't reach, someone called out, "Ellie would have never put up with this."

Another added, "She'd have stopped it in its tracks."

"Nipped it in the bud," came another voice.

This enraged Widmore even more. Without so much as a thank-you, he snarled at Ben and Annie to get their disobedient little arses back to the Barracks before he horse-whipped them both right there, in front of everybody. He would take care of this situation himself.

The next day Ben and Annie sneaked out again, drawn as much by curiosity as the search for more pills. The Staff station door stood wide open, and they almost tripped over the white medical lab coat soaked through with blood, right in the doorway. Neither Ben nor Annie learned who the prisoner was, or what had happened to her. Nor did they ever see that particular Dharma Initiative medical researcher again.

All Ben and Annie knew was that the cold war had just turned hot.

* * *

><p>Over the next few months, Ben began meeting Richard and Charles Widmore alone in the jungle, behind Annie's back.<p>

Annie sensed the change. Where did he go all the time? She wanted to move in with Ben. Why couldn't they live together as a couple? She was tired of sleeping with him in other people's houses, on other people's stale sheets, looking at the abandoned pictures on their walls, only to creep home and pretend to her father that nothing was going on. Not that her father noticed, anyway.

"Why can't we have a house of our own? There's plenty of room in the Barracks now," she repeated to Ben several times a week.

Ben put the question to Richard, who issued a short, sharp "No." Ben was older now, almost twenty-three, but there was something he and Annie needed to understand. They hadn't been ready to hear it before, but now they were. The Good People were like an army, because they fought for what was right. But they were like monks, too.

Yes, some of the Good People paired up, as Charles had with Ellie, even though those two hadn't stayed together. But the most dedicated among them didn't waste their time on marriage or families. Those were for people who weren't serious. Jacob had neither wife nor child, and the Good People were to emulate him as closely as possible. Their cause was to do Jacob's will, to devote themselves to Jacob entirely, body and soul.

If Ben and Annie were going to serve Jacob, they couldn't be selfish. They had to appear innocent as doves, yet be clever as serpents. They needed to look obedient to their parents, above suspicion. Marriage, children, those distracted people from the full depth of service which Jacob required. Their first priority was to prepare for the upcoming battle, the righteous fight which would vindicate Jacob's name and secure the safety of the Island once and for all.

Ben kept silent through this lecture, not having the heart to tell Richard that Annie was already pregnant.

Then Richard told Ben what was going to happen. Ben grew white with shock as he listened. For a wild few seconds Ben thought about grabbing Annie from the Barracks, and running away into the jungle. Just as quickly, Ben dropped the wild notion. He knew how the Good People could move silently through the forest with senses keen as an obsidian knife. How they could blend into the brush and emerge invisibly to cut a man's throat before he even knew they were there. They sliced so swiftly that their victims felt no pain, just faded into unconsciousness and death.

If Ben took Annie into the woods, they wouldn't last till sunset.

Richard gave Ben a penetrating look and said, "You're not going soft on me now, are you?"

Charles Widmore, crouched near the fire, joined in the conversation. In blunt tones he said, "The time is now, boy. Shit or get off the pot."

Ben licked his dry lips, tried to swallow through a throat crammed with sand, and whispered that whatever Jacob wanted, he was ready to do.

"OK, then," Richard said. "We're good to go. And remember, Ben. This is strictly on a need-to-know basis."

On December 19, 1987, the day of that massacre later known as the Purge, Ben awoke with a sick, sinking feeling. Today he turned twenty-three, but birthdays were the last thing on his mind.

His failing spirits didn't come from guilt, or regret for the mayhem he knew was going to rain down on the Dharma settlement at the Barracks. He had never told Annie exactly what was going to happen on that day. As far as she knew, there was to be a raid in the Barracks itself, so that Ben and some of the others could go with Jacob's People, to join them for good. That was all she knew.

Early that morning, Ben waylaid Annie on her way to the communal kitchen and walked her over behind the garage sheds, where hopefully no one would see them.

"Don't go to work today," he told her. "Trust me." He told her to go to Horace and Amy's little cabin a mile to the southeast of the Barracks, hidden in a thick stretch of jungle where very few Dharma Initiative people went. She knew the way, as she'd taken Ethan there to play multiple times. Now, though, she was to stay at the cabin until Ben came for her. Something in his voice told her that more than a simple raid was in the works.

For what seemed like interminable minutes, she debated inside. A chill went up inside her, fear mixed with excitement. She kissed him, a soft quick brush of lips across his mouth, saying that she would wait for him there.

Then as if in afterthought, she asked, "What about Ethan? Shall I bring him with me?"

Ben shook his head. Some of the women of Jacob's People were going to collect the few remaining children, including Ethan, and take them to a swimming hole up by the North Shore, about two hours' walk from the Barracks. They would be safe there.

He handed her a gas-mask, and told her to put it on right when she got to Horace's cabin. As soon as he could, he'd join her there.

It wasn't until late afternoon that Ben finally arrived. Annie had already made a fire, and set water for tea on to boil. He took the gas-mask from her face, gathered her in his arms, and hoped she would ignore the acrid miasma of gas which clung to him. They drank strong dark tea and ate Dharma goldfish crackers, the ones the kids used to call "fish biscuits," even though neither of them had seen the great bear cages of the Hydra Station.

It was such a unique pleasure to be alone together, really alone. They pulled the curtains shut and lay on the rickety iron cot, where Ben praised her eyes, her hair, the whole beautiful length of her, and especially the faintest plump out-swell of her lower belly. They came on and around and inside each other's flesh, until in the midst of the last long bout of lovemaking, her cries of pleasure filled the cabin.

The next day at dawn he brought her back to Richard and the others. Even though Annie never saw her father's body, she cried a little for him. And she never asked Ben where his own father had gone. The corpses at the Barracks had been cleared away, although the tangy, too-sweet smell still hung in the air.

Charles Widmore and Richard came out to talk to the remaining young Dharma survivors. They were chosen, Widmore said. They were going to remake the Island into something better, but to do so, it had been necessary to purge out all the old elements. Everything would be different now. Their parents were gone, and they weren't to think about them anymore. They had new parents now, new people to look after them and teach them. They weren't going to live behind wooden walls and fences any longer. Instead, they were to live wild and free in the jungle, as they were meant to. It would be magnificent. They would see.

Annie and Ben moved into a tent in an encampment up on the farthest northwest peninsula of the Island, a place Jacob's People called Pala. Ten-year-old Ethan moved in with them, almost as if he were their own child.

No one noticed or thought anything of it at first whenever Annie crept away from camp early in the morning to throw up behind a thick covering of scrubby bushes. There had been almost no pregnant women on the Island since the mass evacuation of ten years before. Many of the young Dharma women were gone, or had had their "operations." Most of the women scientists were long past the age of bearing.

Among the women of Jacob's People, pregnancy was rare. Many took Richard Alpert's advice to heart and lived celibate lives, warrior-priests and nuns for Jacob. Of the three women who had gotten with child in the past decade, one had stumbled on a cliff-side, toppling into a ravine in when she was ten weeks along. The second woman thought she was too old to fall pregnant. Her baby was born dead in the fifth month, and the mother herself died a few hours later. It was because of her age, the women told each other, hoping it was true. The third woman was young and strong, yet she grew sick halfway through her pregnancy, and a month later died as well.

No one knew why, because sickness among Jacob's people was almost unknown. The older women blamed the mothers themselves. They must not have loved Jacob enough. They must have been disobedient. Just look at the woman who'd most recently died. She had a man of her own, but she'd been dallying with another in the jungle. It was her punishment.

Richard had no answer, and in fact, considered the whole question trivial. As he told them, he came from a place where women prayed desperately to the Blessed Virgin to survive childbirth, and half the time their prayers went unanswered. "In sorrow thou shalt bear children," his god had said. Only the Virgin herself had been spared the pain and danger. And if even Holy Mary's own mother, the blessed Saint Anne had sorrowed and suffered in childbirth, why should the women of Jacob's tribe be any different?

No help came from Jacob, either. To Richard Jacob dropped vague hints of chosen ones called "candidates," who would come from across the sea. That was more important than anything else. Jacob seemed as uninterested as Richard in the recent deaths.

Charles Widmore said nothing at all. His own children by two different women had been born off-Island, and that caused friction among his lovers among the People, who wanted babies of their own.

Thus, none of the women among Jacob's People had fallen pregnant recently. Until Annie.

(_continued_)


	3. Cactus Land

**Chapter 3: Cactus Land**

_This is the dead land_**_  
><em>**_This is cactus land_**_  
><em>**_Here the stone images_**_  
><em>**_Are raised, here they receive_**_  
><em>**_The supplication of a dead man's hand_**_  
><em>**_Under the twinkle of a fading star.  
><em>**_- _**T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

The yurt was large and round, a leftover from the Island's atomic testing days. Ben and Annie hung a sheet down the center, dividing it in two. On one side of it they slept, while the other side was for Ethan. In the early mornings, the eastern sun rose over the sea and cast its criss-crossed shadows over the two of them, as it shone through the cloth walls and metal fretwork.

After Ethan had gone out to join the fishermen, and after Annie had made her morning trip to the bushes to be sick, she and Ben would lie together, her pale body crossed by sun-shadows. Ethan would be gone for an hour, at least. They were alone, gloriously alone, and even Richard had given up on them. He let them be. The quiet mornings right after dawn were theirs, all theirs.

After making love, they would dress and emerge to the routines of the day. Octopus had to be strung on lines, then hung out to dry. Ben helped drag in the fishermen's nets, full and heavy with pink, yellow or blue-gray fish. The women sat in clusters, mending nets, shelling clams or scallops, or just talking. Annie, his pearl, sat in the center of the warm and protective shell of the women of the Good People, a small smile on her round, sweet face.

Sometimes Ben and Richard would hunt, or join Charles on his horse-taming and breeding expeditions. A small herd roamed the Island, the lead mare proud and independent, letting no one near her. Widmore had already captured one of her herd, a yearling who still refused to submit to the bridle.

The flax sown in the wide, fertile fields of the North Mesa had all sprouted into a wide swath of flowers, each like a tiny blue chip of sky fallen to earth. It would be a good harvest, and Ben looked forward to it all: the reaping, crushing the fibers, the spinning, the dyeing. Annie had already started to learn to weave, her small loom half-warped with thick white string.

For the first time in his life, Ben knew happiness.

There was only one small blot in the brightness, like one of those black dots which float across the vision and can't be blinked or rubbed away. The women of the Good People knew little of the lore and ways of childbirth, so they had only the vaguest understanding of how to care for someone in Annie's condition.

As her belly grew, Annie's sickness didn't stop. Wasn't it supposed to? she wanted to know. No one had an answer. Now she was sick in the evenings, too, and the others in the camp looked askance at her, behind her back.

One evening she crept to Ben and cried on his shoulder, saying that she felt like "a monster." It was true in a sense, for among the Good People Annie had become an object of both wonder and fear. Then, on the day when she couldn't get out of bed, the wonder mutated into terror, and no one felt that terror more acutely than Ben.

Every sign was poor. Annie lay on her cot weak with exhaustion. In order for her to get more rest, Ethan was made to move in with a couple of the older boys. Sometimes at night, Ben could hear them through the thin fabric walls of their own yurt, the taunting lower-pitched voices of the bigger boys, Ethan's sniffles and occasional sharp yelp of pain, followed by silence.

Ben tried not to think about it too much.

He crept in and lay down next to Annie, trying to tell himself that her trembling, clonic spasms weren't really seizures, just fatigue. She grabbed his hand and pressed it against her belly, hard. "Do you feel anything?" she asked, over and over.

He felt nothing, but eventually said that he did, anyway. Then she would close her eyes and give a deep sigh, comforted by his lie for the time being. Nonetheless, Ben started to ask around, because Annie was too afraid to. The only woman of Jacob's People who'd been pregnant had borne her child before coming to the Island. She said that she hadn't felt her own baby in the fourth month, either, but it wasn't the same for everyone. So maybe there was still hope.

Worse than that, Annie started to bleed. It wasn't heavy, no more than the first or second day of a woman's cycle, but it didn't let up. Even the women with no direct knowledge of babies knew this was wrong. The soft dried moss wrapped in rags, which they used for their own monthly needs, did nothing to staunch the tide. The women fed her broth made from whatever animal's blood they could drain, boar or rabbit or chicken, but it did no good.

The only mercy by now was that she was too weak to panic.

Ben knew she was going to die before she did. He sat by her side in the small canvas tent, and gripped her cold, sweating hand. Ethan was tall for his age, gifted with extraordinary intelligence and an almost sadistic intensity of purpose. He had already worked out his own revenge on his tent-mates, and now they avoided him, entering their yurt only to sleep, and even then with one eye open.

The boy's uncut brown hair fell over his eyes as he sat with Ben, both of them watching Annie's every move and breath. When she became delirious she called for Amy, not her mother, and Ethan cried a little. It was the first emotion over his dead parents Ethan had ever shown.

Ben wasn't there when she died. Charles Widmore had sent him to spy on the French research scientists who had landed on the south point of Pala Peninsula. By the time Ben returned, they'd already laid out her cold, inert body in the burial tent.

Jacob's People committed their dead to the earth in several ways. Those who lived near the coast ignited the remains and cast them out to sea. Or, if they lived inland, they built a pyre. This was more chancy, as gathering that much wood took time, and there was always the danger that some dark spirit might seek out and claim the newly-dead.

Widmore held his tongue while they discussed it. He despised these superstitions.

Ben couldn't bear the thought of burning Annie and the child curled up inside of her. So out of sympathy for Ben, Widmore grudgingly agreed to allow the third way.

In the dead of night they formed a long, torch-lit procession. Over his shoulder, Ben bore Annie, wrapped in the white cloth which had hung down the center of their yurt. There was no need for it anymore. Ethan walked alongside Ben silently, his stolid face set in a stony anger quite alien to a child. Amidst the huge, twisting roots of an ancient banyan tree, the Good People dug her grave. Ben curled her body into the customary fetal position and then, almost as an afterthought, laid beside her the little wooden doll, the one in the form of himself, which she had carved so long ago.

"Now we never have to be away from each other," he whispered, before casting the first shovelful of earth.

Opinions differed as to why Annie had died. The women couldn't find anything in her past or character to blame, which left them mostly silent. Then, one afternoon Ben overheard a couple of the men making a few casual remarks, so innocuous in passing, yet they sent a spear of ice through Ben's guts.

"Maybe it was the gas," one man suggested.

"How d'you figure?" his companion said.

"Some were more sensitive to it than others. Those died right away. But remember how many we had to shoot afterwards?"

"Yeah, gas could've got her anyway. Damn shame, that. She was a nice girl." Then the two of them went back to their game of checkers, pushing around colored sea-shells on a crude, hand-painted board.

That evening, Richard came upon Ben as he sat in the banyan's cool green shadows, gazing out over the freshly-dug grave mound. Ben had moved away the branches which concealed Annie's grave, leaving the red earth as naked and raw as the expression on his face.

"You've got to cover that up," Richard said. "You know the rules."

"Go to hell," Ben said in a calm, conversational tone.

Richard shouldn't have looked as shaken as he did. After he pulled himself together, he told Ben that Widmore wanted to see him.

Hot flames of rebellion licked Ben from the inside out when Widmore told him of his next mission. He was to go back to Pala and kill the French woman, the only survivor of the scientific team. Further, Ben was to take Ethan with him. It was to be the boy's first experience with "cleansing the Island," as Widmore called it. Widmore must have told Ethan ahead of time, because the boy was practically dancing with excitement as Ben left Widmore's tent, gripping Widmore's loaded pistol tightly in his hand.

Ben told Ethan to go gather their few supplies, more to get the boy out of his hair than anything else. He weighed the gun in his hand, gazing over at Widmore and Richard as they drank tea and talked in front of the camp's central fire. He opened the weapon and gazed into the chamber. Widmore certainly was stingy with his ammunition. Only four bullets. Well, that was a number Ben could work with. After he took care of the French woman, he'd have a little surprise for the camp when he got back. One for Widmore, one for Richard (_let's see if that cock and bull story is true, or whether Richard can actually die like other men_), and one for himself.

Ethan would get by without him. Maybe he'd even be better off.

It was dark by the time Ben and Ethan arrived at the French woman's camp site. There she was, asleep in the shadows, a fluffy aureole of hair surrounding her soft face. She was younger than he had expected. He'd imagined a woman much like those of Jacob's People: even the younger ones were hard-faced and tough-skinned, their hair frizzed by sun and sea-winds. She stirred in her sleep much in the way Annie used to, with a gentle sigh. The moon caught the roundness of her cheek, making a bright crescent line, one you might stroke ever so lightly with your fingers.

Her moonlit beauty held Ben captive for a few long seconds. It was hard to imagine that she'd killed her remaining team. Ethan chafed at the wait, anxious to begin.

Ben shushed him and moved forward. It was then that he heard the small whimper, the cry which broke the stillness of the night, and roused the French woman from her sleep.

A baby. It was a baby, and a little one, too.

In the remaining instant before the French woman started to scream, Ben had already decided. He scooped the infant into his arms, pressing it close to his chest. Her babbling cries filled the night, but Ben didn't care, almost didn't even hear them.

_You doubted Jacob_, he told himself. _Richard was right when he said you have no patience. Annie's gone, and your own child with her. But here's another one, almost dumped right into your lap. Why are you hesitating? You want Jacob to gift-wrap it for you?_

The Island took, but the Island gave, too. Ben brandished the pistol that he knew he would never use on the screaming woman, then drove her away with one shot fired into the air. "_Alex_," she kept calling out. "_Mon Alex_."

"Come on," Ben snarled at Ethan. They ran until the French woman's sobs faded into the night.

"Why didn't you do it?" Ethan kept asking over and over. "And what d'you want one of those for?" The boy glared at the small bundle in Ben's arms.

Ben said nothing, just marched along through the night. It wasn't until the fires of the Good People's camp could be seen through the black screen of tree branches that Ben thought to unwrap the baby's blanket. Pulling aside the soft wad of moss which served as a diaper, he saw that the child was a little girl.

"Alex," he said to himself softly. "Alexandra."

Later that night, Ben handed the pistol back to Widmore, along with a scathing look of contempt. Then, when tiny Alex sent up a long siren-wail that even Ben knew meant hunger, he silently packed his bags, wrapped the howling baby in a long cloth tied around his chest, and stood for a long, tense moment in the center of the camp.

"I'm going back to the Barracks," he said in a clear voice full of confidence. "There's are things I need there. Anyone who wants to join me is welcome."

A good half of Jacob's People followed him, including most of the women. From the shadows, Widmore watched them leave, the hatred in his eyes gleaming red in the firelight. Richard said nothing.

Luckily for Ben and Alex both, Horace and Amy had never gotten rid of Ethan's crib or cloth diapers. Amy had breast-fed Ethan, though, and Ben almost gave into black panic until one of the older women mentioned that Dr. Chang's wife once had an infant, too. An hour later, Alex was contentedly sucking away at a bottle of canned-milk formula, and Ben thought to himself that living was a sweet thing to do, after all.

Two weeks later, Widmore joined the Good People and moved into a cottage as if it had been his idea all along, ignoring the light of revenge which always shone in Ben's eyes.

Alex thrived, and grew into a plump, laughing baby. Right about the time she learned to walk, another woman fell pregnant. This woman lasted a little longer than Annie had, almost six months, but she too had seizures, bled, fell unconscious, and died.

For Ben and the Good People, that was the year everything changed.

(_the end_)


End file.
